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Matt Cutts used this word during his webmasterradio chat (here's the MP3), but, being too lazy to go back and listen again, I can't remember exactly where - during the Big Daddy rollout part, I think. He then went on to mention it on his Big Daddy blog post, this time in relation to PR updates.

On the latest WMW Datacentre-thon thread - msg #100, member colin_h goes off and does what I'm too lazy to do - trying to find definitions - and then speculates on how it might all apply to the new infrastructure that Big Daddy is ushering in (along with the kewl new things that G will be able to do off the back of said change, as talked about by Matt when covering BigDaddy with Oilman and Webguerrilla). So, there you have it, Orthogonal.

Engineers are always talking about things being orthogonal to each other. The first time I heard the term, I thought it meant something like “11-sided.” It doesn’t. I’ve read the definition many times. I still don’t really get it, which didn’t stop me from casually dropping it into conversations with engineers. “Oh, yeah, that press release is totally orthogonal to the ads we’re running on Yahoo.”

P.S. Doug@Xooglers is right; we probably use orthogonal and canonical and words like that more than we need to. You'll notice in the MP3 that I said "orthogonal" and then backed it up with "independent" so it wouldn't be off-the-charts egghead.

I think maybe the lines example above was a bit off. There needs to be a plane involved ;-)

Anyway I think the reason engineers often overuse the word orthogonal (and non-engineers copy them by further mis-using the word orthogonal) is because orthogonality can be a lot of fun when solving matematical problems. It is the property of "orthogonality" that makes large, complex problems fall apart (through cancellations and such) and become "solvable" problems. Sometimes, they even become "trivial" problems.

There are many, many problems that cannot be solved, unless one finds some assumptions or accepts some compromises such that orthogonality (as an example) is achieved. It is a prize in commercial environments (versus academic ones) because engineers really can't spend all day on unsolved problems.... the company needs to make money ;-)

As for the common use, WordNet (my favorite word site) gets it right as usual. "not pertinent to the matter under consideration", "statistically unrelated", etc.

This orthogonal stuff is much less annoying than the use of canonical. That's just a butcher job.